Appears to be (in some people’s eyes, at least). I don’t hear it and never would accept that there is a “fundamental difference in the tone and pitch of black and white people’s voices that is unrelated to how they speak.” Of course it is related to how they speak. I can speak higher or lower, and I can learn to speak even higher or lower than that. Do you think the stereotypical gay lisp and high voice are physiological rather than learned?
I’ve been called Barry White many times by people who have only heard my voice and never seen me. People that have seen me tend to say I look like (white) Jesus, though. If I had musical training, which I assume Mr. White had, or if I grew up around singers, I’m sure I could make my voice sound even deeper.
When every other difference in accent and speech of whole groups of people is determined by environment, particularly geographical region, yes, it is very difficult to accept that this one difference in these two (poorly defined) groups is due to physiology. Especially when you consider that nobody has presented anything other than anecdotal evidence that a difference exists. People learn at a very early age how to deepen or raise the pitch of their voice. You wouldn’t be able to ask questions sensibly if you didn’t learn it. Everyone knows you can ask a question by changing, among other things, the pitch of your voice? (Say it out loud with and without the question mark.)
Conceivable, but not the most likely explanation considering that physical differences are not offered up for any other differences in speech and language that I know of. Maybe you could point me to some credible theories, though? Remember, we’re talking about groups as a whole, not one individual who has something abnormal that makes him talk a certain way.
Come on, you must have read enough of the etymology columns by Cecil and the SDSAB (band name?) to know that the simple and logical explanation for the derivation of a word is almost never correct. Language tends to follow a much more tortured route.
The problem here is that we’re all arguing out of our collective asses (yeah, me too.) I have yet to hear any solid evidence that black and white people in other countries sound the same (you having heard it on TV doesn’t sway me.) And I suspect that even if natives of those countries COULD perceive the difference a USian might not be able to, since whatever subtleties distinguish “black” voices from “white” ones could well be overwhelmed by the novel (to the yankee in question) accent.
My experience is that black people, apart from their sociolect, DO sound different from white people. But it is true that the last vestiges of an accent may be hard to eliminate, and I could be unconsciously perceiving traces of BVE speech patterns.
I also feel that I can detect a difference in speech style - call it a dialect or sociolect if you will - between educated black people and educated white people. Generally it seems to me as though highly educated black people speak in a highly crisp, slightly formal style compared to highly educated white people. Again, this is just my perception, but it’s not something I’ve read about anywhere else.
Unfortunately, we haven’t established (as in, through citation) whether these differences even exist between black and white speakers using the same dialect - would we perceive them at all without seeing the speaker? Next we need to determine if it is indeed a US-only phenomenon, or whether blacks in other countries have distinct speech patterns from whites - and again, I think it would be important to employ natives of the area to do the ‘detection’, since I suspect any Trinidadian accent (for instance) would outweigh my ability to make this distinction.
Finally, I want to point out that I’m speaking only of generalities. Certainly on a case by case basis, there will be white people who sound “black” and black people who sound “white”. (Although I wouldn’t count Thandie Newton in this category since I would never have guessed she was black, and I think that depends on a very stretchy cultural definition of the term.) Naturally I also realize that black people and white people are not isolated groups and it can be difficult to determine whether someone counts as “black” or “white”. If research were being done, the “borderline” cases would have to be considered separately.
I don’t think it’s biological, but saying that differences apart from “slang” don’t exist is not accurate.
Just a WAG: it may be that black people have less tolerance for a nasal vocal tone and are trained early on not to whine (because that’s how it sounds sometimes). Another one: the voices of black people are smoother–tending not to modulate as frequently as white voices. From my personal experience, white women at least are more likely to talk in questions. As in:
“We are the world? We are the children? We are the ones that make a brighter day so let’s start giving?!”
(Think Joan Cusack and then Whoopie Goldberg in her stand-up act in which she impersonates a white girl.)
Now, that is extreme (and surely annoying to most people), but I think whites in general are more likely to have a fluctuating speech pattern. I know some whites who have pretty smooth speech, but most, if not all, of the black people I know have it. Like nasal tone, this is something that’s easily learned through socialization.
When I was little, I used to watch this show called “Reading Rainbow”. Being the lonely latchkey kid that I was, I used to pretend that my mother sang the theme song. I instinctively knew that the singer was a black woman, just by the quality of her voice. Turns out I was right. I can’t believe Chaka Khan is my mother!
All the races have physiological differences. You can tell from peoples’ faces what race they are… why should there be any difference with voices? Any variation in the vocal tract, no matter how slight, is going to effect voice timbre. Even individual differences are enough to enable us to tell each other apart.
I suspect there is a factual answer to the OP, but finding it would involve taking sound spectrograms and describing the result in terms of hertz and decibels.
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All the races have physiological differences. You can tell from peoples’ faces what race they are… why should there be any difference with voices?
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Does this vocal difference also apply to West African sprinters with a high concentration of fast-twitch muscles?
Glad you said that not me. What race would thesetwo be?
Humans have done so much mingling that there is just as much variation of these traits within a “race” as there is between them… AFAIK there is little if any scientific/biological distinction between races.
And those differences are found amongst even siblings with the same parents… it would be very difficult (impossible) to prove such a close and commonly shared vocal trait in a group as large and diverse as the black population that does not exist in a good chunk of the white/Asian/Indian/etc population as well… in the US or any other country.
I sound a lot more like David Suzuki than J.D. Sumner… who sounds a lot more like Barry White than Michael Jackson. My vote goes for cultural pronunciation as to how we can tell race by voice.
There’s a well-known boxing promoter named “Rock” Newman. He looks quite “white” (I have no pic, but he looks a lot like a middle-aged Orson Welles), but he self-identifies as African-American. I recall him once describing times when he overheard racist comments by whites who assumed as was white as well, only to sh*t their pants when they heard his voice, which sounds very “black”.
However, I have heard some white people from places like New Orleans or the rest of the deep south speak very much like some African-Americans do. These dialects overlap in a few areas.
It is not hard to accept, at all: it simply requires some evidence.
Ever heard Eddie Murphy doing his “white man” bit? He sounds dead on as a typical middle class guy from the Northern U.S.–provided the guy was white.
Even people who grow up speaking American Standard instead of Black Vernacular are going to emulate the tones, pitches, and timbres of the people with whom they most frequently associate (while the dialects tend to be based on grammar, syntax and vocabulary, not sound). While the majority of the East Asian-descended people I know speak with a higher, more nasal pitch than most whites, they are nearly all people whose parents (at the most remote) still lived in ethnic neighborhoods. The few I know whose parents grew up as isolated East Asians in white neighborhoods sound typically “white” (probably because the accent is two generations removed).
It was even more difficult for blacks, in the U.S., to live separated from black neighborhoods. (We’re beginning to see a the first groups of Korean adoptees from white families in the workforce today, for example with no corresponding group of black kids.)
I would not be surprised to discover that blacks in Europe have a “black” timbre. For the most part, they are either immigrants or the children of immigrants from European colonies who are only reaching the third generation away from societies in which African or African-derived speech predominated in the places they grew up.
To posit a physiological basis, I would need to see evidence of actual physical structures that differed in the throats (along with a good explanation as to why a person who was “black” only under the “one drop” rule, and so grew up in a black neighborhood, still spoke “black” despite having less than half their genes supplied from African ancestors).
Yes, we all know that James Earl Jones, Barry White, Chris Rock, and Urkel all have the same pitch, tone, resonance, timbre, and accent because they’re all Black. Everyone knows it. It’s not prejudice at all to point that out.
To rephrase, you can sometimes tell from peoples’ faces what race they are. As for these 2 people, no I would not have guessed they were anything other than white. (Although the second picture made my day :D)
So humans have mingled so much that not everybody is 100% one particular race, but this does not mean that there has been so much mingling that the races have dissolved altogether. Look at nose shape, eye shape, cheekbones… there’s plenty of distinction. And it was mentioned in another thread somewhere that the individual differences themselves vary from race to race.
Right. Can’t prove it yet but I can hear it. Can’t describe it either but it’s definitely there (most of the time). It’s that nuance that Roberta Flack has that Janis Ian doesn’t. It’s not pitch or accent; I wasn’t fooled the first time I heard Skylark’s Wildflower (black group trying to sound white) or Wild Cherry’s Play That Funky Music (white group trying to sound black).
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